by Shadow Prey
“Uh, no, I wouldn’t,” Lucas said. He glanced quickly at Lily, who was staring at Cuervo, fascinated.
“Sesame Street. Big Bird was finding out how doctors take your blood pressure. So this guy ’jaculates on the brunette’s chest and we get Big Bird. And he ’jaculates again and we get Big Bird. It was like that for fifteen minutes. ’ Jaculate, Big Bird, ’jaculate, Big Bird.”
She stopped to take a breath. “That,” she said, “is how I remember Ray.”
“Okay. Well, jeez, we gotta get going,” Lucas said desperately. He pushed Lily out the door toward the stairs. They were ten steps down when Harriet Cuervo came to the landing.
“I wanted to have kids,” she shouted down at them.
Lily grinned at him as they walked back to the car. “Nice girl,” she said. “We wouldn’t do much better in New York.”
“Fuckin’ gerbil,” Lucas grumbled.
“Did you see the calendar on the wall? Big Boys’ Buns?”
Lucas snapped his fingers. “I knew there was something different about the place,” he said. “Ray used to have this old Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar. A wet-T-shirt shot. These great . . . ah . . .”
“Tits?”
“Right. Anyway, it was always the same picture. He found one he liked and stopped right there.”
“So what we got is a change in management, but no change in style,” Lily said.
“You got it.”
In the car, Lucas checked the time. They had been on the street for three hours. “We ought to think about lunch.”
“Is there a deli in town?” Lily asked.
Lucas grinned at her. “Can’t stand to be away?”
“It’s not that,” she said. “I’ve been eating hotel food for too long. Everything tastes like oatmeal.”
“All right, a deli,” Lucas agreed. “There’s one a couple blocks from my place, over in St. Paul. Got a restaurant in the back.”
They headed east on Lake, across the Mississippi, then south down along the river through a forest of maples, elms and oaks, past a couple of colleges.
“All religious colleges. Highest density of virgins in the Twin Cities, right here,” Lucas said.
“Your neighborhood too. What a shame; what a workload,” she said.
“What’s that mean?” Lucas asked.
“When I told people I was planning to go out with you, they all gave me the look. Like, Uh-oh, into the hands of Lothario.”
“Bullshit,” said Lucas.
• • •
The deli was in a yellow cinder-block building with a parking lot in back. When they got out of the car, an old woman was watching them through a restaurant window while she gnawed on the end of a whole pickle. Lily’s face lit up when she saw it.
“That pickle . . . There’s a marginal chance that this place could be all right,” she said. Inside, she scanned the sandwich menu, then ordered a corned beef and cheese combo with coleslaw, a side order of french fries, a seven-layer salad and a raspberry-flavored Perrier.
“A thousand calories,” she said five minutes later, looking ruefully at the brown plastic tray the counterman had just delivered. The counterman snorted as he turned away. “What, you think more than a thousand?” she called after him.
“Honey, the sandwich is six, seven hundred and that’s only half of it,” the counterman said.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Lily said, turning back to the food.
Lucas got a sausage on rye, a bag of potato chips and a Diet Coke and led the way to the back.
“I’m an eater,” Lily said as they slid into the booth. “I’ll weigh two hundred pounds when they bury me.”
“You look all right,” Lucas said.
Her eyes came up. “I’d look great with ten less pounds.”
“I’ll stand by my original statement.”
Lily got busy with her food, keeping her eyes away from his. “So,” she said a moment later. “I understand you’ve got a new kid but aren’t married.”
“Yup.”
“Doesn’t that embarrass you a little?” She licked a fleck of slaw off her upper lip.
“Nope. I wanted to get married, but the woman wouldn’t do it. We’re still together, more or less. We don’t live together.”
“When did you last ask her to marry you?” Lily asked.
“Well, I used to ask her once a week. Then I just made a general open offer.”
“Do you love her?”
“Sure,” Lucas said, nodding.
“Does she love you?”
“She says so.”
“So why doesn’t she marry you?” Lily asked.
“She says I’d be a great father but a fuckin’ terrible husband.”
“Hmph.” Lily took a big bite of her sandwich and chewed thoughtfully, watching him. “Well,” she said after she swallowed, “it sounds like you might fool around a little.”
“Not since she got pregnant,” Lucas said. “Before that . . .”
“A little?”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “Now and then.”
“How about you?” Lucas asked. “You’re wearing a ring.”
“Yup.” She snapped off a french fry. “My husband’s a sociology professor at NYU. He did position papers for Andretti. That’s one of the reasons I’m out here. I knew the family.”
“Good guy?”
“Yeah, for a politician, I guess.”
“I meant your husband.”
“David? David’s great,” Lily said positively. “He is the gentlest man I’ve ever known. I met him when I was going to school. He was a graduate assistant, I took a class. It was about the time everything was going to hell up at Columbia, people were in the streets, McCarthy was running for president . . . . Good times. Interesting times.”
“So, what, you got married right after college?”
“Before graduation. Then I got my degree, applied to the department under a special program to bring in women, and here I am.”
“Huh. How about that.” Lucas watched her for a few seconds, finished a last chip and slid out of the booth. “I’ll be right back.”
They’ve got problems, Lily and David, he thought as he walked to the counter. He ordered another bag of chips and another Diet Coke. She likes him okay, but there’s no heat. When he looked back, she was watching people in the street, a shaft of sunlight cutting across the table and her hands. She’s beautiful, he thought.
When he got back to the table, she was licking her fingertips. “Done,” she said. “Where to next?”
“Gotta go see a nun.”
“Say what?”
A seven-foot-tall alabaster statue of the Virgin Mary hung over the driveway. Lily looked doubtfully up at it.
“I’ve never been to a nunnery,” she muttered.
“It’s not a nunnery,” Lucas said. “It’s a college.”
“You said nuns lived here.”
“There’s a residence on the other side of the campus,” Lucas said.
“How come her eyes are rolled back like that?” Lily asked, still looking up at the Virgin.
“The ecstasy of perfect grace,” Lucas suggested.
“What’s she doing to that snake?” The tail of a snake was visible beneath the Virgin’s sandals. The snake’s body curled up one of her robed legs, its head poised to strike at knee level.
“Crushing it. That’s the devil.”
“Huh. Looks like one of the investigators on my squad. The snake, I mean.”
Lucas had been to grade school with Elle Kruger. They’d tracked each other over the years, Lucas on the Minneapolis police force, Elle Kruger as a psychologist and a Sister of Mercy. Her office was on the third floor of Albertus Magnus Hall. Lucas led Lily down a long, cool hallway that echoed with their footsteps. At Elle’s office, he knocked once, opened the door and stuck his head inside.
“About time,” Elle Kruger snapped. She was a traditionalist, and wore the black habit with a band of beads hanging down beside he
r hand.
“Traffic,” said Lucas in way of apology. He stepped inside, Lily close behind. “Elle, this is Lieutenant Lily Rothenburg of the New York Police Department, out here investigating the death of John Andretti. Lily, this is my friend Sister Mary Joseph. She’s the chief shrink around here.”
“Pleased to meet you, Lily,” Elle said, and reached out a bony hand.
Lily took it and smiled. “Lucas tells me you’ve helped on some of his cases.”
“Where I can. But we mostly play games,” Elle said.
Lily looked at Lucas, and Lucas explained, “We have a gaming group that meets once a week.”
“That’s interesting,” Lily said, looking from one of them to the other. “Like Dungeons and Dragons?”
“No, no role playing,” Elle said. “Historical reconstruction. Get Lucas to tell you about his Gettysburg. We played it three times last year and it always comes out wildly different. Last time, Bobby Lee almost got himself into Philadelphia.”
“I’ve still got to do something about that damn Stuart,” Lucas said to the nun. “When he gets loose too early, he fouls up all the calculations. I’m thinking of . . .”
“No game talk,” Elle said. “Let’s get some ice cream.”
“Ice cream?” Lily said. She put her fingers over her mouth to cover a tiny burp. “Sounds good.”
As they walked down the hall, Lily turned to Elle and asked, “What did you mean when you said, ‘his Gettysburg’? Did Lucas make the game or something?”
Elle raised an eyebrow. “Our boy is a famous games inventor. Didn’t you know that?”
“No, I didn’t,” Lily said, looking at Lucas.
“He surely is,” Elle said. “That’s how he got rich.”
“Are you rich?” Lily asked Lucas.
“No,” Lucas said. He shook his head.
“He is, take my word for it,” Elle said to Lily with a phony confidentiality. “He bought me a gold chain last year that has scandalized my entire wing of the residence.”
“For a good German Catholic girl, I think the influence of the Irish is beginning to seep in,” Lucas said.
“The Irish?”
“The blarney.” Lucas turned to Lily and said in a stage whisper, “I’d never use a word like ‘bullshit’ around a nun.”
They sat in a booth in the ice cream shop, Lucas and Lily side by side, Elle across the table. Elle ate a hot-fudge sundae while Lily worked on a banana split. Lucas blew into a cup of coffee and thought about Lily’s warm thigh next to his.
“So you’re working on Andretti,” Elle prompted them.
“There’s some kind of conspiracy,” Lily said.
“The Indian man who killed the people in Minneapolis, and the Indian man who killed Andretti?”
“Yeah,” said Lucas. “Except we think that two different guys killed the people in Minneapolis. And now the judge in Oklahoma City . . .”
“I haven’t heard . . .”
“Last night . . . I was wondering . . . what kind of group would we be dealing with? If there is a group.”
“Religious,” Elle said promptly.
“Religious?”
“There are few things in the world that can hold together a murder conspiracy. Hate by itself is not enough, because it’s too unfocused and not intellectual enough. There has to be some positive energy, as it were. That usually comes from religion. It’s difficult to be intellectual and murderous at the same time, without some complicated rationale.”
“How about these groups that develop in prison?” asked Lily. “You know, a group of guys gets together and they start holding up armored cars . . .”
“ . . . raising money for a cause. Which usually has some kind of quasi-religious doctrine behind it. Save the white race from mongrelization by blacks, Arabs, Jews, whatever. You see the same thing in the leftist radical groups and even the groups or pairs of psychotic killers you get from time to time. There’s a religious aspect, there’s a group feeling of oppression. Usually there’s a messiah figure who tells the others that it’s all right to kill. That it’s necessary.”
“One of my people in the Indian community said that Bluebird—”
“That was the man killed in Minneapolis?” Elle interrupted.
“Yeah. He said Bluebird was a man looking for religion.”
“I’d say he found it,” Elle said. She had been saving the maraschino cherry for last, and finally she ate it, savoring the sweetness.
“You know how they make maraschino cherries?” Lucas asked, covering his eyes with his hand as it disappeared.
“I don’t want to hear,” Elle said. She pointed her long spoon at Lucas’ nose. “If there’s a group doing these killings, there probably aren’t more than a dozen people in it and that would be an extreme. More likely it’s five or six. At the most.”
“Six? Jesus,” Lily blurted. “Excuse me, my language. But six?”
“What are the chances that it’s three?” Lucas asked. “Bluebird and this guy in New York and the guy in Oklahoma?”
Elle tipped her head back and peered at the ceiling, calculating. “No. I don’t think so, but then, who knows? But I have the sense . . . these men in New York and Oklahoma, they traveled some way to do the killings, if they came from here. If they know Bluebird. I have a sense that they were sent out . . . that they are on missions. Bluebird was apparently ready to die. That would be more typical of people who saw themselves as part of a process, rather than as a last chance to strike back.”
“So there’ll be more?”
“Yes. But there is a limit on size. There really is no such thing as a grand criminal conspiracy. Or at least no such thing as a secret one. I suppose Adolf Hitler and his henchmen were a grand criminal conspiracy, but they needed the collaboration of a nation to pull it off.”
“So there’d probably be at least two or three more, and maybe six or eight,” Lucas said. “Probably held together by some sort of religious mania.”
“That’s right,” Elle said. “If you want to stop it, look for the preacher.”
In the car going back to Lucas’ office, Lily looked him over.
“I have the feeling I’m being looked over,” Lucas said.
“You have interesting friends,” Lily said.
He shrugged. “I’m a cop.”
“You invent games and play them with nuns?”
“Hey, I’m a wild kind of guy.” He looked at her over the top of his sunglasses, winked and turned back to the traffic.
“Oooh, Mr. Cool,” she said. “It makes my thighs hot.”
Lucas thought, Mine too. He glanced quickly at her and she turned away, a blush creeping up her neck. She knew what he was thinking, and she had been aware of him in the booth . . . .
At home, Larry Hart wore cowboy boots, blue jeans and work shirts with string ties. The string ties always had a chunk of turquoise buried in a silver slide. He could have worn that outfit to work, with a jacket to complete it, but he never did. He wore brown suits, with neckties in shades of brown and gold, and brown wingtip shoes. In the dead of summer, with the temperatures climbing into the nineties, Hart would sweat through the tiny tinderbox apartments of his welfare clientele, always in a brown suit.
Lucas had once asked him why. Hart shrugged and said, “I like it.” What he meant was, I have to.
Hart jammed himself into the cookie-cutter frame of a municipal executive. It never worked, as hard as he tried. There was no way a brown suit could disguise his heritage. He was broad-shouldered and powerfully built, with black eyes and gray-shot hair. He was Sioux. Hart had the biggest case load in Welfare. Some of his clients refused to talk to anyone else.
“Lucas, what’s happenin’, babe?” Hart asked. Lucas lounged in his office chair with his feet on the rim of a wastebasket, while Lily rolled back and forth, a few inches one way and then a few inches the other, in an office chair on casters. Hart stepped inside the tiny office and dropped his bulk on a corner of Lucas’ desk.
“Nice to meet you,” Lily said, taking Hart in. “You’ve been out?”
“Yup. Down on Franklin . . .”
Hart had been working through Indian Country with the photos. He knew two of the men himself.
“Bear is down at Rosebud and so is Elk Walking,” Hart said. “They’re pretty tough, but they ain’t crazy. I can’t see them getting involved in anything like this.”
“You didn’t know anybody else in the pictures?” Lily asked.
“Not names, but I know some of the faces. There are a couple of guys I see down at the Indian Center. You were asking Anderson about one of them. I played basketball against him last year.”
“Could we get the team rosters?”
“They’re mostly pickup games,” Hart said. “But if I ask around enough, I could probably find out who he is. There are a couple more faces I’ve seen at powwows, at Upper Sioux and Flandreau, Sisseton, Rosebud, all over the landscape.”
“All Sioux?” asked Lucas.
“I think all but one. Give me the pictures again, let’s see . . . .” Hart thumbed through the stack of photographs until he found the one he wanted. He poked a finger at a man’s face. “This guy’s Chippewa. I don’t know his name, it’s Jack something, maybe like Jack Bordeaux. I think he’s from White Earth, but I’m not sure.”
“So how do we find out about Lily’s man?” Lucas asked.
“There’re a couple of guys out in SoDak who’d probably know him. Deputies. I gave Daniel the names, he called them and they’re driving down to Rapid City tonight. I’m catching a plane out at six o’clock. I should be in Rapid City by seven-thirty. I’ll take the pictures along.”
